Oh, thats interesting.<p>I can imagine that they would be very useful in azure to speed up VM-block storage communications. It possibly is secondary to reducing backbone bandwidth usage.<p>I assume that EC2 has lots of caching to make things viable (basic testing sorta backs that up)<p>They used to be quite popular in VFX land, as one could slap it infront of a filer and get a performance boost, without much work.<p>However once you move to a place where you can easily ans quickly move assets around, and have them on a larger amount of smaller servers (~150 tbs instead of a 1pb isilon cluster) then it becomes less relevant, especially for the price.
Corresponding announcement from Microsoft on the acquisition:<p><a href="https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2018/01/03/microsoft-to-acquire-avere-systems-accelerating-high-performance-computing-innovation-for-media-and-entertainment-industry-and-beyond/" rel="nofollow">https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2018/01/03/microsoft-to-acq...</a><p>Anyone have anything to say about Avere? I talked with them years ago, haven't heard much since.